Standing Alongside Saints

January 19, 2008|By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON, merickson@dailypress.com 247-4783

When the people of Hickory Neck Episcopal Church moved into their new 5,400-square- foot building in mid-2006, they found a lot of things that their old, unusually small colonial brick church never had.

Electric lights and restrooms topped the list of long-awaited upgrades. Room to kneel without backing into your pew was another nice extra.

Yet even while straining to raise the $1.25 million needed to transform their roadside Toano campus, the Rev. Michael Delk and his parishioners knew they had to dedicate some of that money to their age-worn link to the past. Starting almost immediately after the new church's completion, they spent more than a year and $60,000 repairing and restoring the diminutive 18th-century structure - which they soon discovered was in worse shape than expected.

When the old brick walls were finally bolstered and repointed, some congregants looked on with tears as they returned to the intimate, still-candlelit space earlier this month for its first Sunday service. Many others beamed as they took in the newly refurbished sight of the 18-foot-high ceiling, ancient windows and simple, early 20th-century altar and pews, reveling in a connection that goes back nearly 20 generations.

"The Episcopal Church - in many ways - is very traditional. It's important for us to honor our heritage and our roots," Delk says. "We really believe that we're all part of that great cloud of witnesses - that when we worship here, we're standing alongside all the saints and everybody who has worshiped here before us."

Constructed in 1774, the unpretentious 900-square-foot pile of brick is a familiar James City County landmark - one so worn by time that it looks like it's stood watch over Route 60 and its predecessors virtually forever. But it originally rose from its vantage point on a small hill as an addition to a much larger and older building.

Erected some 40 years earlier, the first part of Hickory Neck Church was a simple brick rectangle that measured 26-by-60 feet. It looked much like the sister churches scattered in rural parishes across Colonial Virginia, including structures in nearby New Kent, Charles City and Middlesex counties.

During the third quarter of the 1700s, however, the congregation of what was then known as the Lower Church of Blisland Parish experienced significant growth, resulting in the construction of an addition on the north side of the church. But only 10 years passed before the Anglican faith was displaced as the official or "established" church by American victory in the Revolutionary War, setting off a slow but inexorable process of decay that resulted in the loss of many colonial-era churches.

By 1825, the original chancel and nave of Hickory Neck had fallen into such bad shape that most of the building had to be razed, leaving only the 1774 addition to be transformed into a school. That structure went on to survive the Civil War - especially the May 1862 Peninsular Campaign - and it continued to serve students until Toano High School opened in 1908.

Church services resumed at the restored building in 1915, partly at the urging of the influential Rev. E. Ruffin Jones of Bruton Parish Church in nearby Williamsburg. But not until 1983 did the little brick church get a full-time minister - and not until 1987 did it record its 100th member.

By the time Delk arrived in 2002, however, Hickory Neck had grown so much that as many as 100 people crammed its pews for the most popular of three Sunday services.

"This place grew along with this part of the county - only a lot faster," Delk said. "Even after we added another service, it just grew like a weed. I would look up to see people peeking in at the door - then turning around and leaving because there was no more room."

Despite the old building's shortcomings, the congregation's affection for the space played a key role in the design of the new sanctuary to the east. Look at the simple gabled silhouette of the 18th-century brick chapel, Delk says, and you'll see how carefully Guernsey-Tingle Architects repeated those lines in the new building.

Similar attention went into the preservation of the old structure, a project led by a committee of parishioners chaired by prominent historian Martha McCartney. From the start, however, the group had to juggle numerous historical complications as well as the building's worse than expected condition.

"We wanted to be faithful to the era in which the structure was built. But there was no way in the world to re-create it the way it was in the 18th century. Those enclosed box pews would have been mission impossible," McCartney says. "The changes that were wrought when it wasmade into a schoolhouse were irrevocable - so we had to deal with the hand that was dealt us."